Quote Originally Posted by bartock View Post
It is, of course, wise to look at history, but to continue and place this back to one thing [[and again, why if it was all related to GIs coming back did this not affect EVERY city) is obviously short-sighted. One trick economic pony, the movement of industry off-shore, housing, racial polarity, social programs, etc., blah, blah, blah, all play into it. Corruption too. That's a big one, been going on for the better part of 30 years now; time to assign some blame there.
It DID affect every city: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Erie, Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, Toledo, Chicago, Washington... All of these cities saw identical phenomena as Detroit and Pontiac in the postwar years. The difference is that cities like Detroit, Pontiac, and Flint [[and Youngstown) suffered the effects disproportionately compared to their peers, thanks to a reliance on automobile manufacturing that was shipped out to the suburbs and rural areas of the Midwest. That phenomenon has been occurring for SIXTY years.

If you spend 30 years subsidizing the emptying out of central cities by the stabilizing middle-class, then it's disingenous to be dumbfounded as to why incompetence started showing up among local politicians.